If your closest Apple store is several hours away, I feel for you, but you have a few other places you can get one. If you have a local Best Buy, you can pick one up there, for the same price as at an Apple store.

I was looking through the Sunday ads today, and noticed a Mac Optimization package on the Mac page. For $40, you can get your new Mac optimized by Best Buy’s Geek Squad. Now I’ve been using Macs all my life, and unlike PCs, I’ve never had to “optimize” it right out of the box. I’ve done other things, like remove printer drivers and unneeded languages, but that’s about it. 

Besides, when you first get your Mac, you’ll want to enjoy the great opening Welcome movie. If you let Best Buy “optimize” it, you won’t get to enjoy that. But to top it off, unless something has significantly changed, the Geek Squad knows nothing about Macs [Ed: A little research shows that they don’t know much about PCs as well]. I had a roommate in college that worked at a Geek Squad, and still does, and he couldn’t do anything with my iMac, much less optimize it.

If you are about to purchase your first Mac, and happen to do it at Best Buy, please do not purchase their optimization. If you are having any problems or need any help setting up your new Mac, I can point to you many places to help, Smoking Apples being one of them. Oh, and if you need anything, our number is genius@ourdomain.com.

Aren’t there enough iTunes controllers out there? 

As it turns out no. Bowtie is the latest to the party, and I think its pretty good. Its still a beta, so it does have some bugs. Yes, I managed to crash it within the first 5 minutes of using it. So what makes Bowtie different?
 
Everything and nothing. It does things that other iTunes controllers do, but it does it better. The preferences interface is very simple, with only a few options, but you only need a few options for something like this. Most other apps are overly complicated.   Continue Reading »